I do not know what I am doing ;).
Caveat emptor...
This code attempts to define a new citation command, \textualcite[<prenote>][<postnote>]{<key list>} which produces the target output. Since you didn't post any code, I have no idea if this will work with your actual bibliography style, docum...

Not the answer - ignore that. (Unless you can correct it.) But you might like the last bit ;).

@1010011010 what do you mean by 2e implementation of the fonts? the fonts are not related to 2e, you can get the full sources from the texlive tree, or a typeset book from addison-wesley as a companion to the texbook. The latex2e interface is via the fd files such as ot1cmr.fd in the base latex distribution

@1010011010 If you don't put a OT1 encoded font in fam 0 (\mathrm) then you have to redefine every command that is defined to use fam 0. For example \Gamma is defined to be character from slot 0 in fam0 and that isn't the case if you use a T1 font. So you have to redefine \Gamma (and a host of other commands)

@StefanKottwitz that's not what I'm trying on mychemistry.eu where I also have leadsheets, acro, embrac, enotez, … (all my non-chemistry packages). I don't think a chemistry subforum is needed: there are only five questions tagged chemistry in 2015, non in 2014…

I have to write a thesis and I want to use Latex but I don't know how to do this thing:
I want to write a one-column text in the top of the document, and I want to create a table with 2 column that contain all the notes refers the content of the top of the document.
The notes written below must ...

@WillRobertson -- hi, will. before i can make this change in the table (and i agree, the names are confusing), i have to figure out where the names came from. that'll take digging. will let you know when i figure it out.

@WillRobertson so is guillemot but can't change that either. The names are hardwired into the code of every HTML parser on the planet, the cost of changing them in real money terms would be scary and I'm not prepared to ask (although I edit that bit of the spec)

@DavidCarlisle It occurs to me that I (we?) REALLY need to put the HTML mappings into this package if only for documentation purposes. Q1: Do we really need to have 1-1 correspondence with names? There are no doubt exceptions already?

@DavidCarlisle Q2: is it better to stick with the non-sensible names, or to define sensible aliases?

@WillRobertson the file unicode.xml linked from w3.org/2003/entities/2007doc/#source has (is the source of) the HTML/MathML names and also list all the data in barabara's ascii table and all the names (that were) used in unicode-math. There is not a one to one correspondence but that list unicode-math is used elsewhere in "texlike" syntax not least stix package, mathjax and one of Fred's extensions,

... so changing the "tex names" has much wider implications than just changing unicode-math.

@WillRobertson -- i'm working on an update to the stix "master list". actually, it will be a second list. it will contain the unicode, or pua id, the location in the stix fonts, the assigned name (after changes to the ones already agreed on for the plane 1 alphanumerics; those will also go in an update to the existing table), also mathml names. {not sure i've got them all; please make suggestions.) delays owing to difficulty reconstructing the pua, where codes were reused without consultation.

@DavidCarlisle -- ^^^^^

@DavidCarlisle -- and believe me, i am checking evreything you mention before making any changes. (it gives me headaches and nightmares, and delays my retirement. i won't retire until this is done, and retirement is long overdue.)

@WillRobertson It's easier for me if you keep the old names but make the rr names aliases as then I don't do anything, but then only unicode-math sees the good names and everything else broken, so it may be better to change to make the rr names the main names and I change the unicode-math field in unicode-math.xml, but that will affect other software so I don't like doing it too often. The HTML names don't change, whatever:-)

@DavidCarlisle Hmm, I hadn't realised that people were using unicode-math-table.tex as a reference for anything; potentially bit of a worry since there are some changes/corrections in there from Barbara's original table. (Sorry I've been so out of the loop.) In addition, some of the name changes in there have happened because unicode-math isn't that smart about assigning macros and so on. The best example would be \alpha and so on.

@DavidCarlisle There are also some weird (poorly named) ones like \unicodecdots which is the plain symbol, in turn used for: \cs_set:Npn \cdots {\mathinner{\unicodecdots}}

@JosephWright Do you know how language localization files are used by biblatex? In my answer to this question it seems that when the spanish-apa.lbx sets a value for the smartand counter, it is impossible for that value to be changed by the user. (I tried preamble, \AtBeginDocument and \AtBeginBibliography and none worked.) But if I don't set the value inside spanish-apa.lbx I can then adjust the value in the preamble.

@WillRobertson well they weren't so much except that they were trying to use the tex mappings in unicode.xml but many of those were completely fanciful as Sebastian and I made them up in the absence of any tex-usable fonts. Fred was pushing for a more sane set so I added the unicode-math field at least as a set that corresponded to some sort of reality. stix package doesn't go via that route Khaled just took the names from the unicode-math package, but it uses the same names, with just one r

@DavidCarlisle For now, I'll keep the "rr" names in the main table and define the typos as aliases. But don't do anything rash with updating things on your end until we come up with a more strategic plan.

@JosephWright Just looked at uk.tug.org/training/thesis which also lists U Southhampton, which leads to the very class, that was the base for Thesis.cls from the template site that gave so many of us a headache so many times.

@egreg Not much other than they will be in sequential order, but with gaps. Maybe it would be better to have an environment with a key value for the category which would then consult a list to make the right label

@AlanMunn depends, but one way (if your gaps are not that big) would be to have a \nosection command that takes the title of the category you don't want and increments the counter, but discards the title and doesn't typeset anything, that way your document source matches the published list of categories

Anyone got a pointer on how to use Type 1 fonts from TeX Live with xelatex and fontspec? Isn't polyglossia the logical choice on xelatex? Which means that fontspec is autoloaded can we cannot use a standard package that works with pdflatex.

@DavidCarlisle A user wanted to use one of the Emerald fonts, but using the particular package + polyglossia led to the font disappearing. package + babel + fontenc works fine. I just wanted to know how one would go about loading that font using fontspec

@daleif You can call them the same way as other font. E.g. one of the emerald could be loaded with \usepackage{fontspec}\setmainfont{a picture alphabet} . But you will run into two problems: the font names are not unique and xetex/xdvipdfmx can mix them up. And their encoding is not unicode so the chars can be wrong. It is better to load the font in the standard way through the tfm. This works also with polyglossia, after all math fonts are loaded this way.

@daleif but beware all the hyphenation tables loaded into xetex in tl's default setup assume unicode not T1 encoding so hyphenation will be wrong if you use T1 (unless you are in a language where t1 and Unicode converge of course)

@daleif yes sorry in my mind I'd asked you not to load etex (memoir heads a list of files identified back in feb as loading etex....) (there are not that many in texlive) but I can't find any record of having done so. the 2015 kernel uses extended registers automatically if running on etex, and if you load etex then you re-instate that packages allocation scheme so over-write the kernel one

@daleif considered that, but then people using some of its more weird features find documents break with no way to fix. this way if you load etex, it works as it did before, but you don't get the new features.

I was reading this " (Barbara Beeton states that her small collection has been worth far more in bragging rights than any equivalent cash in hand. She's also somewhat biased, being Knuth's official entomologist for the TeX system" in the article tug.org/whatis.html and I wondered if any one has one of Knuth bug checks, so one can just look at it online as screen shot? It will really be cool to look at one. I've heard of these before.

@UlrikeFischer @JosephWright thanks. I can see that that will work, but I still don't understand why you can't change the value in the preamble when it's set in spanish-apa.lbx but you can if it's not set there.

As a bit of history: Don told me at one point that he did chose Wells Fargo Bank for this because they had such nice checks at the time (with a carriage drawn by four horses - see picture) and that he therefore hoped most people would put the checks on the wall rather than cashing them:
These ...

@Nasser if you are looking for bugs in the tex engine then you possibly want to try with some programs written in TeX (such as latex) but mostly you want to read ever line of the tex source (which is in web/pascal) and find coding errors.

@JosephWright less against it that I used to be, I seem to survive github these days. Still don't actually see any advantage over svn for this sort of thing but github is an advantage over the web svn view so yes I'd be for it overall.

Let the creators of TeX and LaTeX answer:
Donald Knuth wrote in the first chapter of his TeXbook:
English words like ‘technology’ stem
from a Greek root beginning with the
letters τεχ...; and this same Greek
word means art as well as
technology. Hence the name TeX, which
is an uppe...

@JosephWright good and bad aspects to that, if we raise expectations that people can make pull requests all over the source and we haven't the bandwidth to review them, might wish we had a more obviously closed system:-) But cross that bridge when we come to it...

@JosephWright -- the texbook was written using tex82. not in sail. i have a copy of the very original published tex manual, which was written in tex78, so yes, that was sail. and the tex78 input language was rather different in some respects from what we're used to now. (it lacked some features, one of which one of my examples was responsible for getting added. my copy of the manual contains, in don's handwriting, the first input instructions for \firstmark.)

@GonzaloMedina you'd better get started then. "No time like the present" my Mother always said...

@JosephWright not sure of the best github way of keeping in sync I'm "watching" but that only tells me of issue discussion I think, and I have a local clone but that only tells me anything if I manually do a pull.

@DavidCarlisle -- i've got one of those too, but it wasn't the first. the first was pocket-sized, with a yellow cover, and a big green "TeX" and a "texture" of little green "TeX"s printed on it. the actual absolute first was a stanford cs report; i'm not sure whether i have a copy of that or not.

@JosephWright oh OK thanks does that work from my current clone, probably, well I'll not try for a bit, let you get the basic framework setup:-)

@SeanAllred I was asking Joseph what's the best way to keep notified of someone else's repro on github, I was watching it but that doesn't seem to show commits, and have cloned it but can I get email notifications

@DavidCarlisle Well no as we have people on the L3 post-commit hook who are not on the team. It would be easy enough to set up a list for the job (or to ask Rainer to do it, more accurately). If the Git discussions are positive we can look at that.

Hi! Today I found a very simple TeX code... I have never seen any TeX code. All I have seen in the past two years I found and worked was LaTeX... Look at this: Hi! \bye the most simple TeX code! :)))))))))

@JosephWright @SeanAllred @egreg It was the first tex code I have ever seen! I really really want to learn plain TeX! You can not imagine how much desire and energy I feel right now to learn plain TeX!

@EnthusiasticStudent -- whether or not writing documents in plain tex is hard, depends. if you want to see parallel support for plain tex vs. latex, look on ctan for tugboat. then look for tb0hyf.tex, which is the cumulative hyphenation exception list for u.s. english. (the pdf file is also there.) that started out as a plain tex document, and i've never seen any reason to change it to latex, since it's quite specialized, and is automatically reprocessed into a \hyphenation list by hyphenex.

@EnthusiasticStudent -- what is really important though is to have an appropriate structure in mind before starting on a project, and creating a suitable user interface. whether that's plain tex or latex is less important than the fact that it's easy to use, reliable, and doesn't get in the way when you run into exceptions. (the only time it's really more important to use latex is when you're submitting to a publisher. then, always follow their instructions.)

@EnthusiasticStudent -- i've been accused of that. when i have something very simple, no font changes, just text (a letter of complaint, say), i usually use raw tex with the basics in plain tex. if i'm writing for tugboat, i mostly use ltugboat.cls because it's kept up to date. if i'm writing user documentation for ams authors, i usually start with amsart or amsbook. i try to choose what is best suited to what i'm trying to produce, with the fewest adjustments needed to get the result i want.

@EnthusiasticStudent note however that it is true that the command "tex" gives you plain tex, to get a tex interpreter without the plain format loaded you need "virtex" (or equivalent command line option these days)

In the beginning....
there was tex and initex (and virtex)
initex was for making formats (which basically means it has an extra defined command \dump which stops the job and saves a binary file of its internal state, which can be loaded.
virtex was a vanilla tex with no preloaded format, just ...

@EnthusiasticStudent yes there's a timeline somewhere but tex82 appeared in 1982 (there was an earlier program called tex but not really the same, more a prototype) latex2.09 was from around 1985 latex2e from 1993 context from early 1990s